Forget the grand final, this is the hardest week in rugby league

Preliminary finals are to a grand final what a nervy, fumbling first date is to a comfy, content wedding anniversary. It’s edgy expectation versus partial fulfilment.

The penultimate weekend of a season, where four teams fight for the right to advance to the Big Dance, often has players and coaches nervous and uptight. They are aware that a tiny slip-up could end their season days short of what could have been a premiership.

Grand final teams tend to be more relaxed, some clubs simply secure at having already achieved their place in history.

“Players can lose their edge going from a prelim to the grand final,” says Storm coach Craig Bellamy. Even the most vigilant coach can’t counter the doorman whispering to grand final players before kick-off, “No matter what happens today boys, you have done the club proud.”

It follows that a defeat in the preliminary final can be more devastating than losing a grand final. Bellamy, coach of more preliminary and grand final teams than anyone over the past quarter-century, has been more gutted after losing preliminary finals than I have seen him after narrow defeats in deciders.

In 2011, after the Warriors won in Melbourne, he isolated himself from everyone, desperately desolate. His team had been expelled from the previous year’s competition as punishment for salary cap cheating, stripped of all honours and a galaxy of star players. A grand final win would have been redemption for all the world to see. “That was the worst,” admits Bellamy.

Ten years later, a Storm winger dropped the ball with the line wide open, and it was the Panthers who advanced to the grand final against the Rabbitohs. The Panthers were still a little fragile, relying on a Stephen Crichton intercept to launch their dynasty. It denied Bellamy the one prize which eluded him – successive premierships – and he fumed at the front of the bus during the silent journey to the team’s Queensland COVID base where they had been isolated almost all season.

As coach of St George in 1984, I felt a one-point loss in the preliminary final more than a one-point loss in the grand final the following year. Lose a grand final, and you can console yourself with having had the experience. Also, the disappointment is ameliorated if your two lower-grade teams win, as the Dragons did in 1985. Lose a preliminary final, and you walk away with nothing. Many a player has declared after losing a preliminary final, “I won’t watch the grand final.”

Yet, paradoxically, the culture both in the NRL and the AFL says there is only one winner in a season. Every team that failed to stand on the dais on grand final day is a loser. So how can losing a prelim be more devastating? It’s the opportunity missed factor, the nagging feeling that if you reached the big day, you would have won. It hurts more when, throughout the season, your team has dominated the team it could have met in the decider.

Perhaps coaches feel the loss of preliminary finals more than players. Young players at the top clubs believe they will be back the following year.